Gee, what a Surprise: Leftist Profs and Student Groups Lie About David Horowitz

Warping David Horowitz's arguments about Reparations is the preferred tactic for those who want to slander him as a racist.

In David Horowitz’s last blog post he called out a student activist for making up quotes and ascribing them to him. Anyone with half a brain could read the quotes and see that they were obvious forgeries. However not all smear merchants are this stupid in trying to obliterate the reputations of their political opponents. Some are more clever in their lies.

This rule is in full effect for the campus Left’s attempt to marginalize David Horowitz’s most recent speech. A letter to the editor at the Daily Trojan from various leftist campus groups and professors had these smears:

Horowitz has previously asserted:

African-Americans owe American society a debt for having been enslaved for hundreds of years, and that they should display gratitude to white Americans for the system of institutionalized oppression that completely denied African-Americans any human rights;

Muslim Student Union groups in the United States are supporters of terrorist activity abroad, “are part of the network founded by the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas and funded by Saudi money,” and send money abroad to help “exterminate the Jews;”

Students should stay away from “women’s studies, black studies, cultural studies, whiteness studies, post-colonial studies, all those studies [sic]” because they are “dangerous” for students’ minds.

These statements demonstrate Horowitz’s racist, offensive, and ignorant views of various communities, and he has used his Islamo Fascism tour to promote these views and make these statements in the past. The fact that these statements are accepted as academic debate or anything more than racist ranting is absurd and truly a stain on the level of debate in American society today.

The statements and views attributed to me are utterly false. The signers of the malicious and slanderous statement against me may be ignorant of what I have said and written but that’s pretty hard to believe. This is a vicious attack on me, on the College Republicans and on the principle of free speech. That this kind of attack should come from USC professors is disgraceful and merely demonstrates the pathetic intellectual levels of discourse which are apparently tolerated at this university.

Because he has not read relevant texts I have written, Mattson picks up and repeats canards from the left that I have been forced to respond to and that I have refuted time and again. Instead of taking on the actual arguments I have made and trying to understand what I believe, Mattson writes sentences that describe me as “fighting the culture wars by writing numerous autobiographies about how he shed his sixties radicalism, arguing that slavery benefited African Americans [and] sponsoring a Student Bill of Rights that would have state legislatures police classrooms for purported liberal content,…” To which I can only say: “No I didn’t.” I wrote one autobiography. I have never argued that slavery benefitted African Americans, and if Mattson had just taken the time to read the little book I wrote about my reparations campaign – Uncivil Wars – he would know this.

Nor is the charge that I regarded slavery as a benefit to African Americans even the worst misrepresentation of what I have said on the subject: “Horowitz’s move from endorsing the Black Panther Party to saying that blacks should be grateful about slavery because it brought them to America – that trajectory serves conservative intellectuals well today.” Notice how while I am the immediate target it is all conservative intellectuals that are in his sights. In fact, I have never said that blacks should be grateful for slavery. What moron would? Yet because this claim – never attached to an actual quote — appears on leftwing websites, and Mattson has not thought it necessary to read what I actually wrote – whether in Uncivil Wars or in my original article on reparations, which appeared in the leftwing magazine Salon without objection from the editors — he repeats the falsehood and uses it as a stick with which to beat the entire conservative movement.

The other two alleged opinions are actually in quotes but who knows where on earth they’re from. They’re admittedly hobbled together from related statements. In other words — ripped out of context. Horowitz has indeed been critical of the Muslim Students Association for its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. And he has taken them to task for featuring anti-Semitic campus speakers who have called for the destruction of Israel.

Regarding the third smear, it’s again a sliced and diced bastardization of Horowitz’s three books worth’ of critiques of higher education. The authors of the letter to the editor cite this against Horowitz because they want to suggest that anyone who might oppose a women’s studies or an African-American studies program is an evil, racist misogynist. But as Chris Yogerst’s blog today noted, these programs are not about critically studying women’s issues or the history of African-Americans. They’re about exploiting these groups to promote Marxism.

These methods should be quite familiar by now to anyone who’s been following Horowitz’s work and NewsReal’s commentary. This is how the Left operates. Conservatives are not just people with different ideas who can be debated in a spirit of friendship. They’re evil, racist, misogynistic, islamophobic Nazis.

I’m sure it does, Jack. The most annoying thing about it is that they know they’re spreading lies, but that they just don’t care. You can call them out time and again, but they’ll just continue doing what they’re doing. They know no shame.